Wings of Desire

Today, 7 November, is Lidong, the Start of Winter. A classical Chinese almanac defines the term: 'Li is the beginning; dong is the end; all things are gathered in and stored away' — the point in the year when whatever must be kept is brought indoors. Today pairs two films about boundaries. In Wings of Desire (1987), an angel voluntarily gives up eternity and folds himself into a body that can be cold and can be hurt. In Ugetsu (1953), a potter leaves home to sell his wares in a country at war, travels farther than he intended, and finds that returning is the hardest part. One contracts infinity into a finite life; the other folds half a lifetime into fog over a lake. Made 34 years apart at opposite ends of Eurasia, both ask the same question: with only one stretch of time, what is worth trading it for? What winter stores away is not only things, but time.

柏林墙还立着。两位看不见的天使在城里游荡，不干预任何事，只听——救护车里孕妇的心事、路边年轻人的沉默、图书馆里翻书的人。他们比这座城还老，见过这里还没有人类的时候。其中一位慢慢不对劲了：他开始想知道一杯咖啡是什么味道、冷是什么感觉、被一个人认出来又是什么感觉。影片不着急给答案，先让你跟着听上很久。

It competed for the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1987 and won Best Director, then took Best Director at the first European Film Awards in 1988. Rotten Tomatoes records 95% approval across 65 reviews (average 8.7/10); Metacritic gives it 79. Roger Ebert added it to his Great Movies list in 1998, and Empire placed it 64th among the 100 best films of world cinema in 2010. Its importance lies less in the trophies than in its method. Cinematographer Henri Alekan shot the world as the angels see it in black and white and the human world in colour, so that a change of viewpoint becomes a change of position without a line of explanation. The angels describe their function as assembling, testifying and preserving, and the film does the same: the empty expanse of Potsdamer Platz, the graffiti-covered Wall, the library and the circus it records have since been altered or erased, leaving the film as evidence of places that no longer look this way. Wenders wrote it with the Austrian author Peter Handke, with Rilke's poetry among the inspirations. Peter Falk appears as himself, and Nick Cave and Crime & the City Solution perform in the film. Becoming human is presented as a choice requiring courage rather than a punishment: a being with all of time and all points of view has no first time and no last time. Around 1990, Premiere voted it the second greatest film of the 1980s, after Raging Bull, which this archive already holds in its 1980 slot.